All About PERQ Workstations!

One particular type of computer I'm interested in is the PERQ series of
machines. These are graphics workstations, which were sold in the UK by
ICL. The PERQ 1 was an early commercial graphics workstation.
They are truly beautiful
pieces of design...
If you decide that you are interested in owning one of these fine
machines, the good news is that they are relatively common in the UK,
because they were actively promoted for academic work in universities.
Posting to the newsgroup alt.sys.perq has been known to
yield results...

You probably also want to take a look at
R.D.Davis'
PERQ page - the mirrored spheres image is impressive.

There are a number of FAQs on PERQ computers. These tend to concentrate
on the PERQ-1 and 2, but they make interesting reading nonetheless:

You might want to learn the arcane ritual
required to park the heads on the awe-inspiring 14" Shugart hard
disk fitted to the PERQ 1...

The PERQ is soft-microcodable, so anybody can redefine or extend
its instruction set if they wish. It supported bytecode interpretation
in hardware long before Sun thought of Java... ARD12 (Tony Duell)
wrote a three part "Introduction to Microcoding" which makes
very interesting reading: here are parts
one,
two and
three.
You can also have a look at a piece of microcode I wrote, to
implement a ROT13 opcode...

I have both a PERQ 1 and a PERQ 3. Both are described on my
collection page. I've actually (15 years on!)
updated the photographs I've
taken of the PERQ 1, so they're much better quality.

The image at the top of this page is of a PERQ 1,
from an advert in the July 1981
issue of Datamation; you can look at the advert in a
big 1MB version,
a medium 328K version or a
smaller 90K version.
The text is readable in all versions; you should note that it has
at least one technical error, though [the writable control store is
decidedly not optional...]